Links

#1: IIS6 Hangs Randomly

Posted on 2008-04-22 22:45:01 by someone1

Let me start by giving you the history of my application:

It used to run perfectly fine on my old Windows 2000 box on IIS5 with MSSQL 7.

It was time for an upgrade so we purchased a new Win2k3 x64 box running IIS6
and MSSQL 2005 Express. We transferred databases successfully, the website,
and COM objects (one had to be recoded to be x64 compatible).

Now, before going live with the new site, we tested EVERY page of the site,
so we know all database communication works, all COM objects do what they
need to do, and nothing breaks anywhere (if it does i don't see an errors
displayed on the page).

We went live with the new server, and eventually noticed that IIS hangs.
When we go onto the server, there are no errors on the screen, IIS seems to
be running fine, and nothing in the EVENT Viewer (besides some time sync
errors). We tried to do some of our own troubleshooting and debugging, but i
guess we don't know what to look for or the proper way to debug. Everything
runs fine isolated, but when put live, the server will "hang" when loading
pages (as in the page will never load). No Server 500 error or any ASP
errors, just won't load.

After reading some pages here, i though it might be my DSN connection
string, i tried OBDC drivers and OLE DB, both didn't fix the issue.

Well, this can't keep happening but we have NO idea on what else to try! To
get the site working again, we can't run IISRESET (last time i did that i had
to revert everything to x32 mode to get it working again). So in x64 or x32
mode, IIS still freezes. To get it working, i just simple log off and log
back in. If i stay logged out, the ASP pages won't load (something about
creating an object failing, i'm guessing that the COM objects are set up to
use the current logged in user authentications to run). This leads me to
believe that the issue is related to our COM objects, but we have no sure way
of knowing WHICH one or how to even diagnose that.

The ASP pages are very old, coded in VB. I just installed IISState and ran a
dump on the last hang up.

What's weird about this log is that when i ran it, the site wasn't working,
and the dump seemed to almost pause for a bit, then it suddenly started
going. After the dump, i noticed the site was working again, but this NEVER
happens unless i log off first, so i'm not sure if this log even has all the
information needed since it might be a dump of the site working, not hanged
up.

I'd appreciate ANY help that can be given! If you don't see anything wrong
with this log, i'll try to dump another one when the site freezes again (i
just ran "iisstate.exe -p (pid) -d" i hope that's right)

#2: RE: IIS6 Hangs Randomly

Posted on 2008-04-22 22:49:01 by someone1

One more little note:

The site does run fine live for a little bit, its only about 6-10 times a
week that it "hangs". So it does work for our clients, maybe under heavier
traffic it fails? (how would i know how much traffic is coming when the site
hangs?)

#3: Re: IIS6 Hangs Randomly

Posted on 2008-04-23 18:50:18 by patfilot

Correct command line. It looks like IISState was unable to get to
microsoft.com to download the symbols needed to build the thread stacks. It
also looks like there may have been a permissions issue, though this could
be related to the lack of symbols. Make sure you run IISState from an
Account with Admin & Debug privileges (Admin includes Debug priv. by default
but sometimes this privilege is removed as part of hardening the server).